AI's Role in Advancing Psychiatry

René S. Kahn, MD, PhD, Chair of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is a colead on a groundbreaking collaboration with IBM to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into psychiatry. This initiative aims to develop objective tools for assessing patients, predicting outcomes, and streamlining clinical practices.

"This is a collaboration between Mount Sinai and IBM, which obviously knows a lot about artificial intelligence," Kahn explained. "They are going to work with us to develop these tools and to use the AI in the measures that we just discussed." While Kahn has extensive experience in large clinical trials, he acknowledged that using AI in psychiatric assessments is relatively new for him, and represents a broadening of his scope.

A key goal of this collaboration is to move psychiatry toward more objective assessments. "The assessment now is subjective," he said. "One provider has interpretation A, and another may have interpretation B." AI could change that by using audiovisual recordings to measure symptoms, emotions, and cognitive functions in a standardized way. "If we can really use these data from artificial intelligence and have objective measures, that may be a huge boon for the conduct of clinical trials," he adds.

One of the most immediate applications of AI in psychiatry is in automating medical notes. Kahn shared an idea of a tool that transcribes and interprets patient interactions, allowing clinicians to focus more on their patients. "You do not have to write the clinical note because essentially, both the history and the psychiatric interpretation will be done by this tool," he explained. "It is going to save a lot of time, and clinicians can always change or adapt it as they want."

Ultimately, Kahn said he believes AI will be most valuable in predicting treatment outcomes rather than diagnosing psychiatric conditions. "We really need objective measures in psychiatry to predict outcome," he said. "That is my hope—that eventually, we will get there, just like the rest of medicine."

This is part 2 of a 2 part series. You can watch the full interview here, and part 1 here.

Dr Kahn is the Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Professor, System Chair of Psychiatry, and Inaugural Director of the Blau Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.